It's not everyone's idea of a fun day out, but these tourists visiting Volkswagen's Autostadt car factory in Wolfsburg, north Germany, appear to be having a good time. Strapped into a glass lift, they are inspecting new models inside one of two 48m-high towers; essentially, a high-rise car showroom. Away from the towers, you can tour the assembly line, explore the grounds, stare at the artworks dotted around the sprawling site, and visit an exhibition charting the history of the automobile, filled, of course, with VW classics.

Wolfsburg, founded by Adolf Hitler in 1938 as a town to house workers producing the Beetle, has been open for tourism since 1948, when VW saw the benefits of shouting about its success to a depressed, war-ravaged country. The car was an icon of West Germany's miraculous reconstruction, and Wolfsburg, with its roots back to the Führer, was its spiritual home. Curiosity about this chapter in Germany's history, perhaps, has kept them coming since.

Although visitors aren't given a hard sales pitch, and the VW logo is discreetly displayed, there is little doubt that a visit to Autostadt is a first-class branding exercise: on one level, well-meaning; on another, manipulative. Children can even steer small electric Beetles around a circuit, punctuated by miniature road signs and traffic lights. Catch them while they're young, the theory goes, and they'll be customers for life.

It may be a lifeline for VW: new car sales have fallen in Europe for the sixth year running, slumping to a 20-year low, and Volkswagen's sales fell 11% in August. Only the UK market is booming: new car registrations rose by 12.1% in September, for the 19th consecutive month. We might prefer a heart-stopping ride at Alton Towers to a sedate elevator in a showroom, but it seems we love our cars more than we like to think.